Susan Rice and the Sunday show curse

6/7/14 10:14 AM EDT

From my story on why some experts think it might be best to keep National Security Adviser Susan Rice off the Sunday talk shows for a while.

Rice isn’t scheduled to appear on any of the Sunday news shows this weekend, a week after she was hammered by Republicans for saying on ABC’s “This Week” that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl had served “with honor and distinction.”

That wasn’t Rice’s first trip up on a Sunday; her characterization of the deadly attack in Benghazi in 2012 touched off even more of an uproar. Now, Republicans and even some former administration aides say the time has come to retire her as a White House weekend message maven.

“[When] you get to a point in the White House where you realize putting someone on TV creates way more clean-up and way more trouble than gain, then you no longer put them out,” said former George W. Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. “It’s a very simple calculation … It would be a real act of defiance to put her out there again.”

What the administration had hoped would be a joyous return of a captured soldier marked by a Rose Garden speech with Bergdahl’s family has instead devolved into questions over the administration trading five Taliban prisoners for a soldier whose conduct is being called into question and who may have deserted.

Almost immediately a line was drawn to Rice’s 2012 appearances on several Sunday shows following the attack in Benghazi in which she said repeatedly that those who assaulted the diplomatic facility in Libya had been motivated by an anti-Islam video. Her comments drew a furious response from Republican lawmakers and led to her name being pulled out of the running for secretary of state; she was instead named national security adviser one year ago this week, a position that doesn’t require Senate confirmation.

Former press secretaries and political operatives from both sides of the aisle said it may be time to retire Rice from the media glare to protect the White House from further harm, although in both the Benghazi and Bergdahl instances it wasn’t Rice who deviated from the administration’s talking points; in fact, she was following them, aides said.